I've been covering the business of news, information and entertainment in one form or another for more than 10 years. In February 2014, I moved to San Francisco to cover the tech beat. My primary focus is social media and digital media, but I'm interested in other aspects, including but not limited to the sharing economy, lifehacking, fitness & sports tech and the evolving culture of the Bay Area. In past incarnations I've worked at AOL, Conde Nast Portfolio, Radar and WWD. Circle me on Google+, follow me on Twitter or send me tips or ideas at jbercovici@forbes.com.

The British Press Already Has a Regulator: The British Press

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have to work with is the power of government, every problem looks like one that can be solved through the application of that power.

So it’s no surprise that the Leveson Inquiry, convened in response to alleged incidents of cell phone hacking and bribery by journalists at the News of the World and other British papers, has come forth with a proposal for a new regulatory body to prevent future such abuses.

In a nearly 2,000 word report released Thursday, the committee chaired by Sir Brian Henry Leveson advised the creation of a new regulatory body, empowered and overseen by Parliament to address complaints against the press and enforce ethical standards.

In his executive summary, Lord Justice Leveson took pains to argue that “this is not, and cannot be characterised as, statutory regulation of the press. What is proposed here is independent regulation of the press organised by the press, with a statutory verification process to ensure that the required levels of independence and effectiveness are met by the system.”

In fact, participation in the new scheme is voluntary for publishers. Well, sort of voluntary. Leveson: “[I]f a newspaper publisher who chose not to subscribe to the regulatory body was found to have infringed the civil law rights of a claimant, it could be considered to have shown wilful disregard of standards and thereby potentially lead to a claim for exemplary damages.”

So it’s voluntary in the same way that buying into your local mobster’s protection racket is voluntary. Nice newspaper company you got there; it’d be a shame if anything bad happened to it…

A close reading of Leveson’s recommendations exposes all sorts of flaws like these. He says the board should “comprise a majority that are independent of the press.” Isn’t the problem here at in pre-Leveson Britain, no one was independent of the press — that everyone, from Tony Blair and David Cameron on down, was in one way or another beholden to Rupert Murdoch? When Leveson says the new body should have “security of funding over a reasonable planning period,” who decides what’s reasonable?

And those are just the niggles. As Emily Bell notes, there’s a bigger disconnect here. These are proposals for fixing the press as it existed in 1992, not in 2012 — unless perhaps Lord Leveson intends for everyone with a Twitter or Tumblr account to subscribe?

Really, the whole frame of “fixing the press” ought to be discarded. It’s not broken. For all the lip service he pays to self-regulation, Leveson’s proposal overlooks the extremely effective form of self-regulation that already exists: the gleefully aggressive reporting that British news outlets do on each other.

While the U.K.’s highest officials were having Murdoch over for cozy tea and boozing at his parties, while the police were pocketing cash from the News of the World’s editors, it was reporters at the Guardian, in particular Nick Davies, who drove the hacking investigation forward at every turn, surfacing incriminating details that many in the political and law enforcement establishments would have preferred remained buried. If you want to encourage that kind of self-corrective enterprise, you don’t do it by saddling the journalists in question with new rules and guidelines and best practices.

Given the appalling nature of some of the misdeeds committed by British journalists in the last few years, it’s understandable that Leveson feels the need to recommend some course of remedy. But the mature thing to do would be to explain to the British public that press freedom is itself the best guarantor of press transparency. It doesn’t work overnight — the deeper the rot, the longer it takes to clean out — but it does work.

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